I really like this article by Syed...
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/upri ... tq235p6znb"Upright behaviour the way to stop diving
Matthew Syed, Sports Journalist of the Year
September 2 2009, 1:00am,
The Times
I admit it. I once cheated in gratuitous fashion. It was in the final of the 1998 English National Championships, the most important domestic competition of the year, the event we used to call “the big one”.
My opponent was a personal hero: Desmond Douglas, the greatest British ping-pong player of the modern era, who had put the sport back on the map in Britain in the 1980s after the postwar lull when working-class sentiment for table tennis was diverted to upstart sports such as badminton and squash.
What made my act of cheating worse is that Douglas was, and is, one of the game’s great gentlemen, a chap who would rather lose than gain an unfair advantage. It was for that reason that he was held in such high regard by my generation as a role model in word and deed.
It was 14-14 in the deciding game, a crucial moment after an hour of exhausting cut and thrust. The next few rallies would determine the complexion of my entire season. I yearned for the title and the scalp of Douglas, a player I had never beaten. My ambition was all-consuming. I tell you this not in mitigation, but to provide context.
Douglas hit his top-spin forehand high into the air. It looked as though it might fly long, but at the last moment the ball dipped ferociously and grazed the edge of the table. It was a thin contact, but undeniable. Douglas saw it. His coach saw it. Some of the spectators in the front row saw it.
And, yes, I saw it, too, even as I longed to disbelieve the evidence of my eyes. Douglas raised his hand in apology — which is what you do in table tennis when you get an edge ball — but as he did so, I noticed something else: that the umpire had given me the point. The ref hadn’t seen the edge. The point was mine.
I knew that had the positions been reversed, Douglas would have acknowledged the edge and asked the umpire to amend the score. But I was blinded by ambition. I refused to yield. I told the umpire I had not seen the contact. I cheated. As I steadied myself for the next point, I caught Douglas’s eye. It was not reproachful, merely disappointed. I was unable to return his gaze.
Last week, Eduardo da Silva charged into the penalty area at the Emirates Stadium, knocked the ball past Artur Boruc, the Celtic goalkeeper, and came crashing down in a heap. The referee awarded a penalty to Arsenal. If there was contact, it was slight. I thought at the time and continue to think that the Arsenal striker dived — and he has been given a two-match ban by Uefa.
Much of the debate surrounding the issue of diving — and wider issue of morality in sport after “Bloodgate” and other scandals — has focused on detection and retribution. Increase monitoring, use video technology, have more assistant referees, make scapegoats of the transgressors, throw the book at them, and so on.
Many of the ideas are sensible, as far as they go. But they miss the essential point. Examine what happened after Eduardo’s dive.
His team-mates flocked to him in celebration after he scored the resulting penalty, and we can surmise that at the training ground that week he received little opprobrium for his alleged act of deception.
Neither, one imagines, do the other players who dive week in, week out in the Barclays Premier League, Serie A or La Liga, nor the schoolboys and Sunday league players who, at least in part, take their lead from their heroes in the upper echelons of the game.
The managers are no better. When they are not suffering from selective myopia they are seeking to justify rather than condemn the actions of their players. Arsène Wenger’s defence of Eduardo seemed to hinge on the notion that the Croat may have taken evasive action in light of the career-threatening broken leg he sustained 18 months ago, not a credible position for someone as thoughtful and intelligent as the Arsenal manager.
We, the fans, are also complicit. There was no sense of moral outrage in this country when Michael Owen dived to win penalties against Argentina in 1998 and 2002, nor when Steven Gerrard did so against Andorra in 2007. Our lust for England to win overwhelmed the scruples that we would doubtless have expressed had the positions been reversed, such as when Diego Maradona punched the ball into the net in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final between Argentina and England.
When football insiders say that diving is “part of the game” they are, then, right and wrong. They are wrong in the sense that simulation is expressly forbidden by the laws of football. But they are right in that the laws — which are seemingly read by nobody except referees — are only tangentially related to the way the game is played and understood. Of far greater importance are the informal conventions and unspoken assumptions that together govern the way we gauge the morality of the sport and those within it.
And that is the fundamental problem: diving in football is socially acceptable whenever it is perpetrated by one’s own team, which is half the time. There is no sense of shame, no moral guilt, no proper consideration of its insidious impact on the wider integrity of the sport. It is something to get away with; something to be nodded and winked at. It is something with which we all connive — players, managers and fans.
Football will never get to grips with simulation until those within the sport realise that no set of rules or punishments can ever fully police human behaviour. No quantity of extra referees or television cameras; no amount of video analysis or retrospective judgments; no set of refereeing guidelines or punitive sanctions will eradicate the problem.
Diving will persist until there is a shift in values. Until the day that a player is castigated by his own manager on Match of the Day; until the day he is snubbed by his own team-mates for falling in a heap; until the day he is booed by his own set of outraged supporters. In short, it will persist until the day that — for a critical mass of those within the game — partisanship is regarded as less important than probity.
It was only as I was about to serve at 15-14 up against Douglas that my wrong was righted. Brian Halliday, one of my entourage and a dear friend, jumped up from his position at courtside, unable to contain himself any longer. He shouted across to me — in front of 1,000 spectators — that he had seen the deflection of the ball on the edge of the table. I could have ignored Halliday and persisted with my deception, but it would have been obvious to all that I had cheated. I relented and asked the umpire to change the score.
I had lost a vital point. I went on to win the match but, more importantly, Halliday had done me a priceless favour. He had given me the chance to do the right thing. He had ensured that the wider values of sport had prevailed, albeit by an unorthodox route. In short, he had put honesty above partisanship. Morality is, more often than not, a collective rather than an individual endeavour. The sooner that is understood by those within football — fans, players and managers — the sooner the game will be free of the scourge of diving."